Increases in cellular traffic from devices like smartphones and tablet computers have led to increased network congestion at both the base station and the core network. Much of this traffic is due to bandwidth hungry applications like video conferencing, data streaming etc.
Network congestion leads to packet drops and degradations of user experience. Although modern network standards such as LTE (Long Term Evolution) provide mechanisms for fast error correction at the Radio Access Network (RAN), these mechanisms are often wasteful of backhaul bandwidths.